


Diatomic

by astronicht (1Boo)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/F, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-13 07:28:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18936235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1Boo/pseuds/astronicht
Summary: In which Rodney McKay and Jane Sheppard are lesbians, and things go off the rails.





	Diatomic

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a product of badly processed grad school stress. Shoutout to everyone who was writing SGA fic in like 2006; I'm pretty sure I've read most of the vault by now, and it might be the only thing keeping me sane through my dissertation. Bless u. 
> 
> All you really need to know at this juncture is that it's sort-of-modern-au, in that I didn't bother to set it in the show's era and just made like it was 2019, that I decided a female Rodney would still hate the name Meredith, and that hermitknut was very insistent about giving Jane properly butch hair, which I bowed to even after yelling 'BUT SHE COULD LOOK LIKE ROSA FROM BROOKLYN 99' for like 2hrs.
> 
> Enjoy the lesbians.

Major Jane Sheppard had grown up in a little town squeezed between two Air Force bases, and lived in base housing from college onwards, even after she got married, and then even after the split. She never admitted it, but the absence of base life was actually the weirdest thing about Antarctica. McMurdo Station wasn’t Air Force at all; military presence in Antarctica was illegal under international treaties. McMurdo just happened to staff some Air Force pilots, and Major Sheppard just happened to be one of them. For the past year she’d shared a hall bathroom with a rotating cast of electricians, climate scientists, and microbiologists. She wasn’t even allowed to carry her sidearm.

There was a time when Jane Sheppard had been young and dumb and flying F-16s, and friends were sneaking her a little look at the designs for the F-35 and she thought,  _ I’m gonna fly that. _

A few things happened - still young and dumb - and she wound up flying helicopters as often as jets. After she crashed a 40-million-dollar Pave Hawk into an Iraqi vineyard-cum-battlefield, she figured they might not let her have the first crack at the F-35, but her career wasn’t over, yet. It would be a little while till she hit McMurdo.

It was March, and the late summer sun was bright, bright, bright. It was setting sooner now - actually setting at all. Give it a month or two and it would just be Jane and the rest of the small core of over-winterers. She was looking forward to it. People went a little funny here over winter, and after the alchemy of those long midnight months, they came out changed. Either it meant they were on the first transport out, or that they stayed. Jane Sheppard had stayed.

Here at McMurdo, she went hiking sometimes. She didn’t have to speak to anyone for days at a time if she nodded in the right places. Here at McMurdo, no one was checking that Major Sheppard was showing up for morning PT. PT started to mean weird jogs where she planned a looping route to make herself climb all the steps over the heavily insulated pipes that webbed the station’s paths, like some strange science-fiction landscape. Little staircases got you over the pipes, panting in winter gear and praying not to slip off.

Here at McMurdo, Jane still flew choppers. They were little single-engine, five-passenger things, painted cherry-red against the snow. The pilots called them Squirrels.

Here at McMurdo, a normal day went like this: she woke up on a dorm mattress and looked at peeling white paint, electric blue accents, and the room that was the final shell between herself and whatever was out there. She kneeled up on the bed and peeled back the blackout curtain - velcroed onto the window frame. The sun on the snow was brilliant. She showered down the hall. It was usually early enough that she could avoid everyone but the old-timers, who no longer gave a fuck about the 24-hour day. Then she sat with her hair wet and finger-combed it while she checked McMurdo’s intranet weather site on her dorm room’s desktop. She’d had longer hair when she arrived, black and curly-wild and stuffed into tight, regulation buns. She’d cut it off in her third month on the ice, buzzed the back shorter and let the top go a little long.

In winter gear and from the back people mistook her for a man, sometimes, and she got used to turning around and saying quietly, dryly, “It’s Jane, fellas.”

Her team, back in Syria (which, officially, Jane Sheppard had never seen), had called her ‘Shep’. She didn’t want to hear that name on anyone else’s mouth, though. She didn’t think she could stand it. So she became Jane again, like she hadn’t been since college.

The day she nearly got shot down on the only continent on the planet where no wars were ever meant to be fought, Jane sat in her desk chair and checked the weather. It was 12F - pretty warm, and sunny to boot, so she was kind of looking forward to flying a couple scientists around for a few hours to count penguins - her name was down for that on the duty roster. Or, almost her name. Mikey, the other pilot, spelled and pronounced it “Joan”, and Jane didn’t really care enough to correct him more than once. You couldn’t really say her name right, anyway, unless you were from a particular little pocket south of the Mason Dixon, and knew how to fold the vowel in Jane oh-so-softly down the middle.

There was a whole rambunxious pile of New Zealanders at breakfast. Jane let the chatter wash over her and picked at her pepperoni and cheese omelette. Antarctica could be a shockingly loud place, between the wind and the local penguin colony, but it had a silence to its bones that was bigger and deeper and realer than all that, and seemed to pull you down even in the midst of noise, soft and huge and uncaring. Jane liked Antarctica; she wouldn’t mind all that much if this was going to be where she fell, as her velocity  slowed, as she drifted inexorably to the earth. 

*

Jane wasn’t a stranger to that one research installation, the one that no one technically knew was almost-but-not-quite between WAIS and Byrd, out in the Deep Field. That morning a new arrival calling himself General O’Neill pointed at that particular research installation’s coordinates on the map they kept pinned outside the pilots’ office, and said, “Uh, so I need to go there,” to a room that contained Mikey and a coffee pot and Jane just coming back from the bathroom. Mikey was just drawling out, “Well, Sheppard ain’t doing anything this afternoon,” which was a filthy lie. She was supposed to fly those Japanese zoologists to count the penguin colony, goddammit Mikey.

Jane stepped into the room and stopped checking if her fly was down to straighten her back the moment she saw the uniform. This ingrained response was what lost her precious seconds as Mikey blithely pulled out the schedule, crossed out Sheppard’s name on the penguin-counting excursion, and added his own. In a blank box, he wrote TAXI SERVICE: PLATINUM STATUS → Joan S.

The general gestured vaguely out at the snow. “You ever been there before?” he asked, presumably referencing the top secret research installation that no one officially knew about or visited. Sheppard narrowed her eyes, wondered if it were some sort of trap question.

She slid a look at Mikey. His face clearly said,  _ your problem _ .  “Yessir,” she said, leaning against her desk, easy as could be. “Deep Field, a bit southeast of Byrd. Usually a bit of turbulence over the glacier, but not a bad flight.” Sure, it was top secret, but for one thing, she’d had a Top Secret clearance since she was what, twenty-three? The general didn’t need to know that, but regardless. 

She cocked her head and waited to see what the general would do. When he just squinted at the map some more, she added, “I fly a few Deep Field supply runs.” Antarctica wasn’t the ideal place for grow-your-own, and a lot of what arrived at port at McMurdo had to be shipped out again. That was about 80% of Jane’s job: delivering tampax and semi-fresh veg to the satellite installations, and at the beginning and end of the season, hauling people to and fro, huddled up in the big belly of the  Lockheed LC-130, which was basically a troop-carrier plane with skis . 

That was sure a thought that would hit her hard, later: Jane was old enough now to know that it didn’t matter how good a pilot she was, didn’t matter how many experimental aircraft she’d gotten her hands on at Edwards, at Langley - if she’d been flying the big, clumsy LC-130 instead of a quick little Squirrel that day, after she woke up and checked the weather and New Zealanders were loud at breakfast and Mikey stole the penguin survey flight - that would have been Jane Sheppard’s last day on earth. 

Near death by smart bomb was one of the few things neither Jane nor Jane’s half-diagnosed PTSD was expecting from Antarctica, but it was nice to know the place was still willing to surprise her. 

A few hours later, after she’d flung herself out of the Squirrel like it was the gut-shot Pave Hawk all over again, she thought about patting a snowbank and whispering “Aw shucks, the magic isn’t gone after all, baby,” to Antarctica herself, the oddest mistress. But that was the adrenaline talking, and she didn’t really have the breath to spare. 

Instead, Jane tried to judge whether the damn thing was a true dud bomb or if she was gonna have to radio McMurdo for whatever passed as a bomb squad. She had a sinking feeling that she would be the closest thing to a resident expert, anyway. 

Jane actually  _ did _ know a little about bomb-squad procedure from the time her squadron had done some paratrooper training with the German Special Forces about five years back. In the down time she’d chatted to a guy out of Frankfurt who would talk your ear off about American steaks, his beloved two-year-old daughter, and his time pulling on 75 pounds of EOD bomb suit and touching live explosives.

Even with all the shielding equipment, Jane remembered, your hands had to be bare. You had to be able to touch it with your fingertips, and convince it to work against everything that chemistry and entropy wanted it to do. Without taking her eyes off the missile, Jane tugged off one glove.

“Major,” said General O’Neill, from his own snowbank.

Problem was, Jane had a parka, not a bomb suit. Not to mention, this looked less like a missile and more like something you’d pull out of the coastal lagoons where she’d grown up, or maybe what would wash up on the beaches after a hurricane. Sea cucumbers got that big. So did man o’ war, so did lotsa things.

Man, she really hoped this sea cucumber didn’t blow up.

“Major,” said the general behind her.

“Sir,” she replied, pulling off the other glove.

“Don’t touch it,” O’Neill said. “I’ve got it handled, Major.”

She half-turned, keeping it in her sight against the glare of the snow. Sometimes people panicked, away from the Station and out on the ice. It really hit you here how big this place was. O’Neill didn’t seem ruffled - not by the space, at least. He was also keeping a beady eye on the downed missile.

“Equipment malfunction,” he said, dry. “But base has it covered, and if they mess up again, then I have it covered. Not your problem, major.”

Jane’s eyebrow ticked up further. “Seems  _ kinda _ like my problem,” she said, in case this guy didn’t quite get that the two of them were standing twenty feet from something that had chased Jane goddamn Sheppard right out of the sky. She’d been going to fly F-35s, once. 

“You know, in the grand scheme,” she added, in case he wasn’t getting it.

“Well,” said the general, his footsteps crunching up to stand next to her in the snow. “I suppose you’re a little right about that.”

That would have been a lovely thing to hear, Jane thought morosely, if it weren’t followed by, “So, what level of security clearance do you have right now?”

O’Neill had his mittened hands on his hips. Around them in a perfect circle was nothing but the the ripped raw horizon, the scrape of ice and rock, a little red helicopter, and the strange missile lying like a dead thing in the snow. Jane answered him, and wished really hard that Mikey had taken this flight. Mikey was a civilian who’d learned to fly choppers on Australian ranchland. He said Aussies used choppers to herd cattle at round-up season because their ranches were so big; Jane figured he could herd whatever he wanted if he would just trade places with her right now.

Her stomach sinking, she realized Mikey would never have made it. Mikey wasn’t a bad pilot; bad pilots didn’t fly in Antarctica. But Mikey hadn’t ever had anything worse than a pissed-off bull chase him in a chopper.

“Right, uh huh,” the general was saying. “That the highest you’ve ever had?” he asked.

Jane’s highest clearance had expired about the same time she got on the second plane in the many, many legs of a journey that would take her south to McMurdo. She told him that too, and got an eyebrow raised right back. She kept her face impassive behind the aviators, let the bright sun bleach her expression clean. He could assume what he wanted. About her work, about why she was here and not somewhere else, anywhere else.

“Well, that’ll save me some paperwork,” O’Neill said wryly, because her highest clearance had once been very high. “Why don’t you put those gloves back on and we can get back in the chopper?” he added, in the overly-reasonable voice of someone talking to an unknown quantity.

Jane sent a pointed look at the fleshy...thing in the snow.

“They’ll send out a retrieval team. We don’t have to be part of that.”

Jane didn’t budge.

“This is pretty close to Byrde Camp,” she said, slowly, meeting the general’s eyes for the first time. “Only about fifteen people live out there, but it’s just about two miles from here.”

O’Neill glanced at the horizon, in totally the wrong direction for Byrde. “I’m not spinning you a yarn, Major,” he said finally. “They’re not going to leave it lying around.”

Jane looked at him, long and hard. Silently, she backed away, then turned and hauled herself by her harness straps into the Squirrel.

They left it there, in the blowing snow of the chopper blades, the strangest thing washed up on the strangest shore.

*

The semi-secret research installation had a different feel from McMurdo station, though at first glance Jane couldn’t tell exactly why. Outside, it had the same look as Mactown; yellow-beige corrugated siding that looked like rural American clapboard if you squinted, heaps of gray snow shoved out of the way against buildings, everything up on cinder block stilts. People were rushing around in a frenzy on the ground, and Jane kept an eye on her instruments and another on the sky, in case something else had gone wrong, but the wide sky remained empty except for her.. 

As she started landing procedure she glimpsed a Tucker Sno-Cat, one of those weird Antarctic haulers that looked like a backhoe spliced with a tank, getting prepped to go out. The bomb retrieval, hopefully. But then she and O'Neill were down and out of the Squirrel, and O’Neill was shoving open heavy steel doors and scanning a security card, and Jane was left to amble after him into the cool dark.

Inside, it wasn’t actually dark, but fluorescent lighting seemed muted after snowblind. Jane slid off her sunglasses quickly and stole a few seconds to close her eyes entirely. After a few moments of total vulnerability it made your irises adapt faster. 

The hall looked less like MacTown chic (peeling paint, linoleum) and more like stainless steel and fresh drywall. It was all pretty new, she realized, not a bunch of gear from the eighties, from the fifties, used and reused, scuffed and smelling like everything indoors in Antarctica eventually smelled. And the people they passed didn’t look like the kind of private, introverted maybe-assholes you usually found on the ice. Hell, they looked like the sort of people you might see in a grocery store. More importantly, “no permanent military presence on the continent” or no, Jane and the general had passed no less than three civilian-clothed US Marines in the hall, or Jane Sheppard would eat her helicopter. 

She was just starting to get nervous, her back prickling - marines and smart anti-aircraft missiles in the secret research installation, it did not look good - when through another door she saw an electrical shop that at least looked as lived-in and chaotic as McMurdo’s. Two guys were sipping coffees next to a workbench, and taped in a place of honor over their heads were several photos of penguins attacking Leonardo DiCaprio. Everyone in Antarctica loved the photos of dumb tourists being attacked by penguins, especially the DiCaprio edition. Thank God, she thought, at least there were some normal, semi-sane people here. 

Hilariously in retrospect, it was as this thought crossed her mind that Jane Sheppard first stepped into a room containing Dr Rodney McKay.

*

That day was not Major Jane Sheppard’s last day on earth. It was, however, the last day Jane was bound to a single atmosphere. You tell a pilot there are other skies, and she’s going to intend to fly them. It’s just how it is.

*

The weirdest part of finding out that there are aliens, and that maybe you’re an alien (“You’re  _ deliberately misunderstanding me!” _ a woman in the orange fleece screamed at Jane. “I thought he was the geneticist,” Jane said, pointing a lazy thumb at the asshole who had nearly shot Jane Sheppard down, “Get  _ him  _ to tell me I’m not an alien.”) was the awkward morning after, when you were still stuck in the same square two kilometres of secret research station with everyone who witnessed, firsthand or via gossip, your newest major life event.

Then, you had to eat lunch in a room with all of them. Jane stood for a moment, fixing the weight distribution on her cafeteria tray, and surveyed the field. She recognized a few people, but they were at the bigwigs table. Her known-factor alternatives were lean pickings. She didn’t want to sit with the geneticist who had nearly blown her up, or the marines, who definitely knew she was Air Force and probably knew or would know within half an hour that she technically outranked most of them, for whatever reason, and wouldn’t particularly appreciate it.

She did recognize another voice, a loud one. That’ll do, she thought, and steered towards it. She didn’t have to know or like any of these people to know that they were unified in the pastime of hating and fearing the woman called Dr Rodney McKay. This made Jane the only one in the building who was happy to see Dr McKay in the cafeteria, because Jane had clocked that being verbally abused by Dr McKay would make her more fast friends in this place than anything short of vodka bonding. She figured she might as well do her time, collect her abuse, and cash in the social reward by commiserating with the rest of the base. It honestly seemed like the path of least resistance.

As she drew closer, she saw that Mckay already had a hapless victim in her grasp: a young woman in teal scrubs. McKay was leaning over her lunch tray and complaining a mile a minute about...something. Jane walked slowly and listened for a bit and still wasn’t sure.

“I’m like a - a free radical!” Jane heard. “A singular oxygen atom, no bonds, no steady outer shell electrons, deeply attractive to other oxygen atoms that want to attain me and be all - all diatomic,” Rodney McKay informed her entrapped audience.

“Oh look!” the woman in scrubs said, “It’s that Air Force girl with the gene!”

Jane shot her a betrayed look.

McKay ignored all of this with aplomb. “I’m deeply vulnerable,” she told her pudding cup.

“If you’re a free radical, do you also cause cancer?” Jane drawled, moving in and edging her tray down on the table, a little down from and across from McKay. 

For a moment, small enough that Jane could have blinked to avoid it, McKay’s eyes came up and locked on Jane. Then her gaze flickered down Jane’s body, categorical and dismissive. It felt like being scanned in one of those machines at American airports: it penetrated deeper than you were really comfortable with, but was reassuringly unenthusiastic about the data collected.

“Don’t pseudo-science me about free radicals, Major,” McKay sighed. She was eating pudding-cup flan, on closer inspection, which was both amazing to see (flan! In Antarctica! Jane had traded three cases of beer for a single fresh pear last month at McMurdo) and a level of disgusting Sheppard wasn’t used to seeing outside military men.

“I’m just gonna - a coca-cola,” announced the latest McKay victim, staging a tactical retreat. 

“It’s Major Jane Sheppard,” Jane added as she unfolded her utensils and napkin, because it seemed more likely that McKay had forgotten her name than had a keen interest in preserving rank. McKay shrugged expansively, gulping down some water, and said, “Oh I know. Obviously. Anyway, I was just telling scrubs over there-” and then neatly transferred her rant onto Jane. 

While Jane’s half-assed plan had involved a little light sarcasm (in case the bear required poking), Jane quickly found that sitting back and letting the rant happen was the easiest form of socializing she’d ever experienced. Absolutely nothing was required or expected of her - McKay had even cut it out with the weird oxygen metaphor, probably assuming Jane didn’t know anything about electron shells, and just bitched about the dangers of being brilliant and single in a man’s world, which was apparently what the oxygen thing was getting at in the first place. She switched instead to a long and rambling story about how exhibition lesbianism had gotten her nowhere in dissuading the male masses from their ardent pursuit.

“I’m probably in danger at all time,” McKay was peacefully concluding. Jane had to almost respect that fact that she wasn’t actually sure whether she was being fucked with. 

While she considered this, McKay stole a huge gulp of Jane’s apple juice. “Wait, what’s - what’s in this?” McKay demanded, glaring accusingly at Jane. “This isn’t coke.”

“Apples, Apples are in this,” Jane replied, stealing it back and hunching around the cup protectively. Even if it was very, very from-concentrate, this was her first apple juice since before Syria, and if she was going to have to listen to some self-satisfied academic talk about how she’d held the suitors in her field at bay by publicly declaring rampant lesbianism at an international conference, Jane was going to do it in possession of her own damn apple juice.

“This could have been anything! You could have killed me! And then we’d never know if those idiots from CalTech believed me about making out with Jennifer Lawrence in an elevator. I can’t believe that string-theorist tried-”

“Y’know, I’m a  _ female combat pilot _ ,” Jane pointed out, eyes narrowed, when it seemed like they were straying back to the extreme pressures in academia on women, even declared lesbian women.

McKay paused for a blessed second and focused on Jane, really focused, for the first time. Her eyes narrowed. She licked her lips, frowning. Her reddish-brown hair was back in a scruffy braid and she had a widow’s peak and a near-permanent slight frown. Jane wondered if she really had ever used a keynote address to announce that she was (as McKay had phrased it) a rampant, carnivorous lesbian. Jane tried to imagine it, but right now, McKay just looked annoyed, not rampant or carnivorous or particularly lesbian. “You know, sometimes this works,” she said pointedly, though Jane was the first to admit that she had no idea where the point might be.

There was another pause while McKay finished the flan. 

“Well,” McKay said finally, mouth still half full. “Female pilot, huh? You’re not the first I’ve met, you know. Congratulations on your sexual assault statistics, though.” She smiled and pointed her spork at Jane.

“Thanks,” Jane said, dry as the desert. “And congrats right back atcha, for giving good enough head to get a phD.”

Whoops. She’d never been that good at this whole female solidarity thing.

McKay snorted derisively, patted Jane’s hand, and said, “Two phDs, actually,” then stole the rest of Jane’s apple juice and chugged it.

Okay, then.

*

Dr Rodney McKay (phD, phD) was thirty-five to Jane’s thirty-six and about Jane’s height, but stocky where Jane was lanky and apparently trying as hard as possible to look more forty-five than her actual age. Like most of the engineers and archeologists, she stomped around in hiking boots and fleece jackets and wore incredibly dumb looking suburban-dad sunglasses if forced to go outside, to keep off the snow-blind. The geneticists and medical doctors wore scrubs and sneakers, and the mathematicians and hard-sciences wore the ugliest goddamn loafers and terrible button-downs under puff-jackets. So, to Jane’s bored Nancy Drew-ing,  one of those phDs was probably engineering, though who the hell bothered to go past an MA in goddamn engineering, unless they wanted to teach? 

McKay was unlike Jane in other ways, too - Jane had cut her hair off in Antarctica, but McKay’s was just past her shoulders. She mostly wore it frizzy and loose or in a low, lazy ponytail, and it never looked like it had been washed within the week, which was maybe why it was so bushy. It wasn’t so much a red-brown color as it looked like a pale brown that had been put in the wash with some red socks, and came out an awkward not-copper color. Her too-expressive face would have been too much for Jane’s secondhand embarrassment threshold, except that Rodney McKay was almost always emoting nothing but rage, contempt, or blatant lust for Jane’s magic-fingers.

Not like that. Jesus.

That said, O’Neill had given Major Sheppard next to no marching orders, and no one else seemed to know what to do with her, so when a terrified engineer-looking person shoved a printout of some sort of spreadsheet schedule onto Jane’s tray in the mess the next morning, she just shrugged and figured - why not?

It was early even by first shift standards, and when Jane wandered into what looked like a storage-slash-makeshift breakroom a few third-shifters were still up, greeting 0600 with glasses of shitty scotch. They looked guilty when Jane stuck her head in, but she gave them her laziest smile and drawled, “It’s five o’clock somewhere, huh?” They nodded fervently. Bad button-downs and loafers - these were some physics or math guys, then. God, it could’ve been Stanford all over again. “Hey, d’ya know where Lab 5 is?” she asked, waving her handout. “Or Dr McKay?”. McKay’s name wasn’t on the handout, but Jane couldn’t actually believe that anyone else would draw up a magic-touch-some-alien-things schedule on Access because it was too complicated for Excel. 

There was an awkward moment where they just stared at her, bug-eyed, and she eyed the flags on their lanyards and thought she was gonna have to break out her really bad Korean. Then one said, “Better you than me,” and pointed her down the hall, to the left and - well. He broke off and drew her a map on a legal pad. Jane politely pocketed it when he was done, and didn’t tell them that she’d been trained to memorize maps a lot more complicated than several floors of top-secret lab space in a lot less time. They seemed nice.

Lab five was tucked next to a cavernous high bay and across from a clean room. The clean room was designated Lab 4, and Sheppard was pretty sure she heard someone shouting, in Czek, “there’s a  _ reason  _ there’s an alert system, and that amount of plutonium in the vents is well within acceptable levels!”

She happily steered away from the clean room - she’d never had to wear one of those weird white suits, anyway, and they looked hot - and shoved open the heavy double doors to Lab 5.

Rodney McKay was not waiting for her; instead, she found a young woman wearing a sky-blue lanyard the support technicians seemed to have, who had a cute afro and was armed for 0600 hours with a large coffee and a bag of shrimp-flavor potato chips. She stared at Jane. Jane gave her a long, slow grin, and the tech blinked a couple times, clocked Jane as ‘that girl with the alien genes’, and waved a hand at the rest of the long, long room. “Thanks,” Jane said, but she’d already shuffled shyly back to a nest of laptops.

There was some noise coming from a distant corner of the lab, around the jutting hulk of what might’ve been a mass spectrometer alongside a few other things that Sheppard didn’t recognize, and wasn’t sure she cared to. She wandered that way, and once out of sight of the tech - you could fit a Star Wars convention in this room - discovered Dr McKay.

McKay was under a lab table on one of those wheelie things people use to tinker under their fancy cars. Jane would love a fancy car, she mused, waiting for McKay to notice her. But combat pay had stopped after Syria, and Antarctica was not the perfect place for any car, much less her sex-dream-car, which is obviously the Alpha Romeo Giulia. In red.

(Nathan had kept the car in the divorce, because Jane had said he should. It wasn’t a sex-dream car, but it was a real-dream car: Mustang GT Premium Fastback, five liter Ti-VCT V8 engine with a beauty of a six-speed manual transmission. 50k, after all the bells and whistles, but they’d been able to afford it back then.

She’d stick with the imaginary Alpha Romeo.)

McKay was muttering, elbows jerking, something that sounded like, “Just try to pull me out of  _ this  _ project, you goddamn cunts.” At first Sheppard thought she was being addressed, but then McKay saw her boots and jumped so violently that her she banged her face on something and wheeled out from under the lab bench with two furious fists full of glowing blue conductors and a bloody nose.

“Oh, wow,” Jane said after a too-long pause.

“You  _ think?” _ McKay shrieked. It wasn’t that much blood, but there was some. “This hardware is worth more than the GDP of at least five EU nations, and my brain - unscrambled, without any cranial bones shoved fatally into my frontal lobe - is worth one hell of a lot more than that.”

“Kay,” Sheppard said. “Wanna napkin or something?” She looked around; unsurprisingly, no packs of napkins were hiding under all the trailing mechanics.

If it were possible, McKay’s face became even more comically furious. “You’re offering me  _ feminine hygiene products  _ after you break my face?” she hissed, still laying on the wheelie thing, face under the blood going purple.

“What?” asked Sheppard.

McKay’s faced flicked through a few too-fast expressions, but somehow landed on less-pissed. Instead, Sheppard got some sort of pitying disgust. “Oh right, you’re American. You know, military presence aside, you’re barely a majority among the scientists. You should probably keep that in mind.” She sighed and without sitting up, shouted. “HEY, YOU,” - Jane tried to hide that she’d jumped - “FIND ME A SERVIETTE.”

The distant, distinct clatter of a body leaving a rolly chair sounded from the front of the lab.

Jane leaned back on a six-foot vent hood behind her (in which there appeared to be a magnesium fire contained between two blocks of dry ice, but that did not seem like Jane’s problem), scratched the back of her neck, and smiled cool as could be while she watched Dr McKay sit up, scowling and holding her fleece sleeve to her face. It was possible McKay was blushing a little, high on her cheeks, but that was probably just the rage. “I’m too valuable to be damaged,” McKay grumbled again, but it was muffled by the fleece.

“Well,” Sheppard said, “If we’re talking about personal value, I guess I have a little of that around here.” She crossed her ankles and tipped her jaw up and leaned back.

McKay took her sleeve away from her face. The smallest smudge of blood was still there, above her full lips. Her eyes narrowed. Then she shoved the mess of weirdly glowing blue wires on top of the lab table and stood up, gathering two laptops, a box of pop-tart knockoffs, and what looked like one of those heavy lead aprons they make you wear a dentists’ offices during x-rays.

Jane watched another drop of blood bead on her upper lip, watched the way her mouth parted slightly because she wasn’t breathing through her bruised nose. Watched her thighs flex, straining her cargo pants as she braced herself to stand. They way McKay’s hand came up to her mouth, away, the way she frowned. It really was a tiny amount of blood.

McKay froze like she could feel Jane looking at her. Jane swallowed. She rarely felt compelled to fill a gap in a conversation, but here she felt like she needed to fill a gap in action. The tension mounted in her belly. Her mouth was dry. Her hands twitched out, as if to cross the space between them, but she froze and jerked them back.

McKay unstuck. She still wasn’t looking directly at Jane.

“Come along then, Major,” McKay said in her normal, snippy voice, turning on her heel and stomping off down some sort of laboratory thoroughfare. “I’ll show you what your value is.”

Jane, goddammit, Jane went.

**Author's Note:**

> @astronicht on twitter


End file.
